Jabalpur VHP chief booked for selling over 1 lakh fake remdesivir injections
Congress demands CBI probe
This report was first published in www.indiatoday.in and has been posted here without any alterations or editing. To read the original report, CLICK HERE
Jabalpur Police has booked the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) president of the outfit’s Narmada division along with two others in a fake remdesivir scam case in which over one lakh fake injections were sold to hapless people trying to save their loved ones during the pandemic.
“The accused have been identified as Sarabjeet Singh Mockha, Devender Chaurasia and Swapan Jain, who have been booked under Sections 274, 275, 308 and 420 of the Indian Penal Code along with relevant sections of the Disaster Management Act and the Drugs and Cosmetics Act,” said Jabalpur Additional SP Rohit Kashwani.
Sarabjeet Singh Mockha, who is the president of the Jabalpur VHP, also owns the City Hospital. Devendra Chaurasia works as his manager while Swapan Jain handles dealerships of pharma companies. While Swapan Jain has been arrested by the Surat Police, Mokha and Chaurasia are still absconding.
According to top sources, Mockha was in touch with the son of a top minister in the government and had got 500 fake remdesivir injections from Indore and sold them to patients at his hospital for Rs 35000-40000.
The Congress has meanwhile demanded a CBI enquiry into the fake remdesivir racket in which over one lakh such injections produced using salt and glucose were sold through a network of touts across the country.
“The CBI should investigate this multi-state scam. 3,000 such injections reached Indore, 3,500 reached Jabalpur. Who all were administered with these injections? If the CBI does not investigate, we will go to the court,” Congress Rajya Sabha member Vivek Tankha said in a tweet tagging the official handle of the CBI.
The Indore Police has meanwhile slapped the National Security Act (NSA) on six of the 11 people who have been arrested so far.
The Vijay Nagar Police in Indore swung into action after a tip off from the Surat Police and a constable was sent as a decoy customer to one of the accused who sold several remdesivir injections bearing the same batch number 246039 A.
The police are now claiming that it is looking for those who were administered these fake injections even as a youth had approached it claiming he had purchased the injections for the parents of his friend who passed away last week.
Several people have approached the Jabalpur Police with such claims and the same are being verified.
Gujarat Police had unearthed the scam earlier and arrested two people from a farm house near Surat where over one lakh fake remdesivir injections were allegedly made from salt and glucose.
Courtesy: www.indiatoday.in
Let the Truth be known. If you read VB and like VB, please be a VB Supporter and Help us deliver the Truth to one and all.
Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
